Italian 3D printer company WASP, also known as the World’s Advanced Saving Project, stays pretty true to its name – the company always works hard to make sure its technology is helping people find sustainability and meet their basic needs in a world that is constantly changing. Whether it’s eating the right food, having access to medical solutions, or just keeping a roof over someone’s head, WASP is on a mission to help people help themselves through the use of 3D printing.
“The challenge…is to give everyone the chance to make their objects by downloading the project from the network or making their own,” WASP writes in its company manifesto. “In this way a new concept of production is born, which reduces shipping costs and drastically reduces material wastage, thus slowing the increase of waste to be disposed of.
“The Earth’s resources are not enough to support the existing population explosion and to change the growth models is no longer an option but rather an urgent need.”
That’s why WASP MED has announced the launch of a free add-on for open source software Blender, version 2.8, specifically for the modeling of orthoses with 3D scans. WASP has been researching and working on this add-on for over a year, and is happy to finally report its release.
The idea behind the WASP Med Blender Add-on was to “fill the gap” between available open source hardware, which is powerful and less expensive but not developed specifically for medical applications, and professional software, which is rigid and costly, to create an open source modeling tool that can be used by medical professionals to develop 3D orthopedic prints.
Alessandro Zomparelli, a computational designer and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, has experience modeling objects based on the human body, and helped WASP develop the add-on. WASP said that his previous work was “key to create a powerful tool that allows professionals to easily draw complex shapes on 3D scans.”
- cropping undesired parts
- drawing the shape of orthoses
- exporting the mesh for 3D printing
- fixing the scan
- making modifications and corrections
- managing thicknesses and borders
Hopefully, the free add-on will make it easier to provide access to 3D printed medical devices that are too expensive for some people, or where access to treatment is not readily available. WASP believes that its new Blender add-on is a step in the right direction to creating a worldwide collaborative community where professionals can easily use open tools to create healthcare solutions.
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[Images: WASP]